Second Violin (12 page)

They found ‘my mate Erik’ by the waving of his lantern, down a dark alley created by long, long trains of goods wagons.

Erik had a gift for the obvious, ‘This ’im?’

‘Course it’s ’im.’

‘Worth savin’ is he?’

Trager said nothing to this. Erik rolled back the door of a boxcar, shone his light inside to show a wall of square packing cases stacked like toy building blocks in the nursery.

‘See where the bottom one’s out? You get in there. We push it back and you got about half a metre clear on the far side. You’ll be snug as a bug in a rug. Gettit?’

‘Yes. I gettit. But I need to know. Where is the train going?’

‘Five o’clock tomorrow morning, it’ll pull out for Munich. Munich’s first stop. Half the train’ll uncouple there. This bit goes on to Stuttgart. After that
you’re on your own. Plenty o’trains cross the border from there. You just have to find one.’

Hummel looked at Trager. This wasn’t what he wanted, but it was pretty much what he had expected. Another wink from Trager and he paid off Erik. Erik went off down the line, swinging his
lantern.

‘I’ll tuck you in,’ Trager said, inadvertently maternal, and as he and Hummel squatted down in front of the gap in the wall of packing cases, Hummel took another roll of notes
from his pocket and held it out. Trager looked at it by the light of his torch.

‘It’s not about money.’

‘Of course not. All the same you’ll take it?’

Trager hesitated, took the bankroll and said, ‘Get inside now.’

Hummel slid in, felt a moment’s passing panic as the last box was pushed in behind him cutting off the torchlight, and said, ‘Goodbye Joe. And thank you.’

The last words he ever heard from Trager, half-muffled by the boxes, were, ‘I didn’t do it for the money.’

Hummel gave it about an hour, decided it was close to 2 a.m., and pushed at the loose box. It slid out as easily as it had slid in. He tried the sliding door, found it was not
locked, slid the box back into place and jumped down to the tracks.

There was moonlight overhead, but the shadows from the trains left it too dark to see what was written on the side of the car. He took the risk, pulled out a pocket torch, cupped his hand around
the beam and found the word ‘Stuttgart’ chalked just to the left of the door. The same word was written on the cars coupled at either end. He chose the righthand car and crawled
underneath. He took off his coat, jacket and cardigan, unwound the long stretch of Hessian, inserted a meat hook at each corner, and slung his new hammock between the axles of the boxcar. Lying in
it, case clutched to his chest, money-belt feeling lumpy round his middle, he found he was well clear of the ground – Trager had got the measurement right – but he’d still be
visible to anyone searching underneath. If they searched underneath.

He heard an engine in the distance, building up steam. Then the slow, rhythmical throb, the inhalation and exhalation, as it drew nearer. The bump as it touched buffers, sending every car into
temporary motion, one after the other, a metal ripple, like a giant’s card trick. When the train pulled out he could feel the jolting in every bone in his body and began to wonder if he might
not rattle to pieces long before Stuttgart, but once the train gathered speed, the roughness evened out and he began to think that it might even be possible to sleep in his hammock, to lose the
sense of the ground beneath him rushing so rapidly past.

The train stopped well short of Munich. From the time they’d travelled Hummel thought they could be no further than Linz. It was light, and it was cold, and it was damp. Morning in
mid-November. There was shouting, and there were boots running up and down almost level with his eyes. Then he heard a door slide open. Not the car above him, the car he had been in, it sounded
like. The sound of the packing cases being torn down, and a voice saying, ‘
Niemand
!’

Three pairs of boots gathered right in front of him.

‘Wankers,’ a voice said. ‘Total wankers, just wastin’ our fuckin’ time!’

‘We could search the lot,’ a second voice added.

‘Don’t be so fuckin’ stupid. One yid in a haystack? . . . I ask you is it worth it?’

The train moved on.

‘Erik?’ Hummel wondered. ‘Gus? Just so long as it wasn’t Trager.’

It was three days later – eating nothing after he had finished his cheese sandwiches on the second day, drinking out of firebuckets – that Hummel found himself at
Strasbourg in France, a town that found itself in Germany or in France from one time to another, depending on who was winning. At Strasbourg, speaking no French, he simply uttered the word
‘Paree’ at the ticket office and, in response to words he did not understand but whose meaning had to be obvious, put down all the francs he had. Even he could understand when the clerk
told him with words and grimaces that it was not enough. And when he wrote down the figure on a piece of paper Hummel pulled out more than the equivalent in Austrian schilling and proffered them.
The look on the clerk’s face was part of Hummel’s immediate education in the ways of the French nation. The way the man rubbed the thumb of his right hand against his first two fingers
spoke more than words. Was this a country in which one could bribe one’s way? That, thought Hummel, might well be to the advantage of a man with no papers and a fat wodge of foreign currency.
Hummel offered the price of the ticket again. The clerk grinned, swept the bribe quickly off the counter and punched out a ticket. And a world of new possibilities began to open up for Hummel.

On the train, acutely conscious of what he looked like, he shaved, washed, cleaned his teeth, changed his shirt, combed his hair and did his best to knock the mud off his overcoat and
trousers.

A few hours later, looking almost respectable – somewhat worse for wear than the customary railway passenger, he thought, but hardly a tramp – he stepped off a train at the Gare de
L’Est . . . wreathed in steam and smoke at his ankles, an urban hubbub of foreign syllables lapping at his ears – into a city of dreams, a city that spun dreams and consumed dreams, a
city of which so many had dreamt – but Hummel had not been one of them. All his life, it seemed to Hummel, he had dreamt of Vienna. And now that was what remained of Vienna – a
dream.

Sigmund dreamt. He was back in Vienna. Not the Vienna he had left only months before, nor the Vienna of his youth, but the city around the year 1900, the Vienna of Empire, the
Vienna of Franz-Josef . . . Vienna before the war. Vienna before Sigmund was ‘Freud’ in the one-word way Picasso was ‘Picasso’ or Shakespeare ‘Shakespeare’.

In his dream he was sitting in a café he could not name. A fine spring day, the trees in the square outside the window in bud, sunlight glinting on the cutlery at his table. He was
thinking about the book he was writing,
The Interpretation of Dreams,
and with the hindsight of the dreamer knew that he had already finished this book, that it had run to eight or nine
editions, had been translated into half a dozen languages. The waiter took his cup away and replaced it with one twice the size, and when Sigmund had finished that, one yet bigger. Soon he was
drinking coffee out of a cup the size of a bucket – and found he could drink no more. The cup once raised to his lips tipped coffee down his shirtfront. He looked at the waiter, waiting. He
was not alone, a dozen waiters stood in line behind him. The man in the square was ringing a handbell and shouting something Sigmund could not understand . . . and it was Autumn, leaves tumbling
down around him, a wind blowing them flat against the glass. And suddenly he was alone, the sole customer at the sole table . . . no cup . . . no cutlery . . . no tablecloth . . . just the man with
the handbell outside the window.

He opened his eyes. He was in his study in Hampstead, stretched out on the chaise longue reserved for the analysands. His daughter, Anna, was standing over him.

‘The telephone?’ he said.

‘Made it through to the dream, eh? Yes, it was Alex Troy returning your call.’

‘You should have woken me. I would have taken the call. I have been trying to meet him since we got here. Somehow we always seem to miss one another.’

‘Plenty of time,’ said Anna. ‘Would you like to tell me about your dream?’

‘My dream told me there was not plenty of time. I saw the grim reaper. He had a bell rather than a scythe but I knew him all the same. I saw myself go from anonymity to fame to oblivion in
the course of a rather large cup of coffee.’

‘Chastening.’

‘Quite.’

Hummel walked as far as the Île St Louis without opening his Baedeker. It pleased him to drift without words, without guidance, albeit in the right direction. On the Pont
St Louis that linked the small island to the larger Île de la Cité, he opened his case and took out the Baedeker, looking for the address from which Schuster had written to him –
Rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondisement.

He unfolded the maps, turned the book this way and that to find the Quartier Latin. He must have stood too long. By the time he found the Rue Mouffetard on the pink map he realised that he had
been caught by a street artist. A man wearing a cloth cap back to front, a blue canvas jacket stained with pastels, sitting on a folding stool by the bridge wall, was rapidly sketching him in
charcoal. By the time Hummel had folded the maps back in and was ready to set off again, the man had leapt from the stool to offer the portrait to him.

It was accurate, Hummel knew. It was chilling. The man had caught the way he felt. The way he knew himself to be. The gauntness, the hollow cheeks, only emphasised by the big ears, the lines
etched into his face by the months since the Germans marched in, the cold light of grief that had lingered in his eyes like impending rain since the death of his father. And to crown it all,
shaving and washing and brushing had not prevented him from doing up the buttons on his overcoat wrongly. He looked like an overgrown child, clutching his case too tightly as comfort. He looked an
oddity, big ears, big feet, wrong buttons. He looked like what he felt he was – another
Jujf Errant.

Honesty earned its reward. Hummel gave the artist a couple of schilling and took the portrait. He’d never had a portrait before, not so much as a snapshot from a box camera since he was a
child – but if he had to have one he wanted one that was honest.

Hummel found the apartment Schuster lodged in. Halfway down the Mouffetard, up a staircase, above a
bouchier chevaline.
He’d passed two or three on his walk down
the street, along with fishmongers, wine merchants, coffee shops and greengrocers. It was a street of bustle. In total contrast to the street of tailors he and Schuster used to live in. There,
silence had not so much reigned as ruled. Noise was unwelcome. Whole days passed without the sound of a voice, the background burble of a wireless – often as not just the rattle of the
treadles on the sewing machines. He rather thought Schuster must enjoy the contrast.

Confronted by the landlady he kicked himself. What folly had led him to presume that Schuster would lodge with Jews? That he would be able to get by on the lingua franca of Yiddish? This woman
– short, late-forties, dark hair done up in a greying bun – was about as Jewish as the pope. Madame Birotteau, that much he could grasp, and all she seemed to grasp of his was the word
‘Schuster’.

She encouraged him inside, rattled off a few sentences of bafflement, and, seeing his incomprehension, picked a photograph off the sideboard and pointed. Herself and a teenage boy.

‘
Mon fils
, Charles!’

Hummel deduced that he was her son. Easy. What he didn’t deduce was that she was telling him the boy would be home from college in an hour and spoke German. He accepted a cup of coffee,
took off his coat, sat silent and nervous on a straight-back chair and waited for he knew not what.

Shortly after five o’clock, a tall, pretty young man bounded up the stairs, dropped his books on the floor, threw his cap at the peg on the wall and began a fulsome account of everything
that had happened to him since breakfast; the bus ride, the lecture, who he had chatted to over lunch . . . before noticing Hummel.

Hummel stood, held out a hand and said, ‘Hummel.
Aus Wien.
’

And the boy understood at once.

‘You’ve come all this way to see Manny?’

‘I’ve come all this way to escape the Nazis,’ Hummel said.

The boy sat down, pulled up a chair, closer to Hummel, reassured his mother with a smile.

‘Herr Hummel, Manny Schuster has already moved on. He has been in London since September.’

Hummel’s heart sank. Another presumption, for which he could kick himself. He’d counted on – felt as though he had staked his life upon – Schuster being here.

‘But,’ the boy went on, ‘his room is still empty. I could talk to my mother. Perhaps you could stay here, at least until we can make contact with Manny.’

‘I have money,’ Hummel said. ‘I can pay. It must be dangerous to take in Jews.’

‘Not yet. Jews are not popular. Foreigners are not popular in a country flooded with refugees. But I cannot yet say that it is dangerous to take in a Jew.’

‘All the same . . . I can pay.’

‘It isn’t about money, Herr Hummel.’

Madame Birotteau let Schuster’s old room to Hummel without hesitation. Charles Birotteau showed him up to the attic. A single white-painted iron bedstead, big enough for
Schuster but short for Hummel, a hand-sewn cover in blue and white, a jug and bowl on a tiny deal table, a view over the rooftops towards the Panthéon and the Jardins du Luxembourg.

‘It’s a chilly room,’ Charles said, ‘but an hour before bedtime we could light the paraffin stove and warm the room.’

Hummel wanted to tell the boy that for a week he had slept in a shed and for three nights had been suspended beneath a goods train. Chilly did not matter – clean and dry mattered. To be
safe mattered. To be still mattered. For the whole world to stop moving around him mattered. But he found he could say none of this. He found that the power of speech had dwindled to almost
perfunctory answers to questions. His capacity to initiate conversation seemed to have been abandoned in Vienna along with everything else.